Amalgamize, Then Split

It is time for Republicans to understand that their philosophy does not work.

It is heartening and somewhat sad, to see one of those who when he used to blog, trumpet the cause of small government. Now as a multiplicity of problems being befalls his local community, he has joined the rest of us, calling out our government for failing to do its part…or failing to spend money in their communities.

This shows the lack of logic behind their original claim, that smaller government IS better.

It is at times, and isn’t at times.. But when push comes to shove, the sole reason for our prosperity lasting since the First Great Depression ended with WWII in 1940, has been the expanse of government which has taken taxes from those with extra cash, and created jobs.

So, the answer is pretty clear. Listening to every Republican candidate mouth the same panacea to a plethora of problems, (no new taxes), means they all have to go….

The solution will be to vote entirely Democratic this next election. Within two years, that body will again be split and we will again have divided government. The Democratic Party will become the Democratic Party of Conservatives, Democratic party of Middle Roaders, and the Democratic Party of Progressives.

The Democratic party is now one unit… It won’t be if no Republicans get elected in 2012…

The difference between having Congress divided among a single party, as opposed to having it divided between two political parties, is that in the first scenario, there is no excuse not to compromise and get things done…

The past Budget Showdown showed the American People than in closed rooms, deals could get done… It was when those doors opened and the wealthy benefactors heard what was being proposed, … that they ordered the talks shut down….

So, voting all Democratic, IS a way out. Don’t expect big progressive changes. Just expect Congress to talk cordially with each other and compromise the way they used to, back in the olden days…

Of Course Mother Nature Hates Republicans!

Many of the areas hit by the storm had also been hit by Irene. In New Jersey’s Hamilton Township, Tom Jacobsen also recalled heavy spring flooding and a particularly heavy winter before that.

“I’m starting to think we really ticked off Mother Nature somehow, because we’ve been getting spanked by her for about a year now,” he said while grabbing some coffee at a convenience store…..

OF COURSE YOU DID, DUMMY. YOU VOTED FOR REPUBLICANS!

To The Occupy Movement…..

As I stepped out into the morning cold, I thought of you…. Wow, this is going to take one hell of a commitment….

This cold presents problems.

The first and primary problem, is staying warm… Any scout, boy or girl, knows camping is fun, in summer. But winter camping is only for those who “seriously” want that badge… One has to be extremely motivated.

There are laws against campfires within the confines of a city for good reason. Those laws are in place and attempting to fight them to maintain a protest, would undermine the cause for which that protest is being fought.

Moving the protest from out of the public eye, would to those only familiar with the history as represented by television, be analogous to failure… A protest needs to be seen to bring in new fuel…

Not. Necessarily. So.

I believe we should take a lesson from the American Revolution. Like today’s occupiers, they, the “real” American patriots, were fighting a token war against the most powerful military on the planet, against a majority of the wealth invested on the planet, and against centuries of ignorance that percolated to the top of intellectual thought across the planet…

And the only thing they had in their arsenal, was ideas.

Ideas, that people should be the ones controlling their own destiny. Ideas that people voting in their own self interests, would more than likely, steer the nation in the right direction, as opposed to the wrong one… Ideas that property mattered. If you took the “people’s money” than the “people” had the right to decide where it was spent….. Ideas that if you enacted all these principals, then everyone’s life would more likely be better off because of the less likely chance some faction would rise up and upset the apple cart.

And they had a handful of people, with which to back up those ideas…. But it was just a handful… And they were dedicated…

You of course have heard we won the war at the battle of Yorktown. We trapped the British, Cornwallis surrendered, and the armies went home…

But unless you studied the Revolution in detail, you probably are unaware that we lost the battles of Lexington and Concord. We lost the battle of Bunker (Breeds) Hill. We lost every battle fought for the control of New York City. We lost the battles of New Jersey. We lost the battles leading up to the Occupation of Philadelphia. We lost the South. Except for a few engagements, the British Army was free to wander around as it pleased… for the most part until the end.

In fact if you look at what we won, it was a paltry amount. We won Trenton and Princeton. We won Saratoga. We won a few clashes in western North Carolina, we won Yorktown.

But each win came just at a critical time. The Trenton/ Princeton campaign kept the army from disbanding when their original tours expired. The win at Saratoga convinced the French that signing on with us against their enemy, would be worth their expense. The battles in North Carolina harassed Cornwallis enough he decided to move to Virginia and in his haste, he allowed himself to be boxed in. The French did the rest.

The war probably ended because the British were engaged in a major war with France, and since America spoke English, it was kinda obvious to all but the Tory politicians, that we would evolve to become their longterm ally, except for the immediate problem that we were currently fighting them. The British withdrew from Savannah, from Charleston, from New York City on their own; we didn’t force them out…..

So the lesson to the occupiers, is: that you have to endure. You could set up winter camp in some field, miles from the action, as long as you were there… Of course with every cold snap, every foot of fallen snow, you should anticipate the trudge of camera men’s feet, as they came to see how Mother Nature was mistreating those who had a cause to fight for.

The fact that you don’t go away, becomes the prime weapon of choice. Since everyone knows you are there now, they don’t need it in their face, day to day… Comparison can be made to the cities of the Revolutionary War, where those citizens didn’t even feel the impact of having a war. Life went on as before.

But in the end we became the United States of America, not the American Commonwealth of Britain. WE did so because when it snowed, our feet bled in that snow. WE did so, because instead of being embrace with our families’ arms, we were camping in the woods with men. WE did so, because we simply refused to go away.

So as the winter comes, the Occupiers need a winter camp. The campaigns will come again in the summer to be sure. But the fact that each of you “stuck it out” and stayed all winter simply because America’s Wealth said “Fuck you! Middle Class!” and you thought that was wrong, will be for what all future generations will be giving praise….

My advice? Accept the reality of the current circumstances. It’s time to camp for the winter. But don’t give up… America is counting on you to make the historical change that will be necessary for the United States to fulfill the promise it’s Constitution made to “WE, The People.”

People trump corporations … at least in this nation, during this time period they do…..

That people so firmly believe that, so much they will endure arduous hardships to prove the intensity of their belief, in the end, is what matters.

Iraq And One Sided Argument

It’s kinda odd…

It is like hearing only the one point of view coming from the woman, that she and her man of 35 years were splitting up, and in that report was her accusation that he was a deadbeat, wouldn’t show her affection, couldn’t perform when it counted, and was selfish, uncaring, and just impossible to live with… Then you hear from another source, that it was her who abandoned the family, and ran off with another man, leaving her husband of 35 years to care for the children, and run the household as a single dad.

But no one reports that. All they talk about is how she should take him for every penny and that she deserves to be happy too…

It is sort of that way with the war. It has almost been a full week since Obama has announced the end of the Iraqi War.

What fills the media?

That every Republican Presidential candidate has said it is a mistake. That Republicans in Congress, while they are taking credit for all the happiness coming from the news back home, in Washington, are trying to stymie the winding down of military action… That even within the Obama administration enterprising reporters were still able to find some voices of dissension that perhaps we were being a little too hasty in running out on Iraq…

All the argument is over Iraq…

Uhh, hello?… whose money is it that we’re spending?.. Uhh.. Shouldn’t that huge portion of the argument get some play?

I mean it would around a family dinner table. “Dad, I want to go to Harvard… It will cost $40,000 a year… ” “Nope, can’t afford it. You’ll need to rethink your future.”

Or in a bedroom, “Honey, we need all new furniture. I’ll put in on layaway this next Monday… ” “Nope, can’t afford it. You’ll need to rethink your priorities.”

Or in ones car. “Dad, I need the PS3.. My PS2 and PS1 games are all out of date.” “Nope, can’t afford it. You’ll need to rethink your spare time.”

Just the actual occupation of Iraq, cost us $720 million each day.

Isn’t it ironical that those who very same who were willing to gamble with our nation’s credit rating to cut expenses, are the very ones calling out Obama for turning off the spigot? Doesn’t that just sound like a bunch of hypocrites?

Just to give you an idea as to what that money could be otherwise spent on, here is a list compiled by a group that is against the war. No doubt it has probably had it’s numbers bumped up, but still it gives you a general feeling and some insight into what else that $720 million could be used…

One Day of the Iraq War = 720 Million Dollars, How Would You Spend it?

One Day of the Iraq War = 84 New Elementary Schools

One Day of the Iraq War = 12,478 Elementary School Teachers

One Day of the Iraq War = 95,364 Head Start Places for Children

One Day of the Iraq War = 1,153,846 Children with Free School Lunches

One Day of the Iraq War = 34,904 Four-Year Scholarships for University Students

One Day of the Iraq War = 163,525 People with Health Care

One Day of the Iraq War = 423,529 Children with Health Care

One Day of the Iraq War = 6,482 Families with Homes

One Day of the Iraq War = 1,274,336 Homes with Renewable Energy….

One Day of the Iraq WAr = $2.34 dollars each day into the pocket of every American man, woman, or child… One week =$16.38… One month = $70.36 .. One quarter gets rounded up to $213 and if cumulated over an entire year… 365.25 days… Every man, every women, every child, every toddler, every infant, is being costed by the war…$854 dollars!!!!

So why is no one talking about it?

Let’s backtrack to 2003 one month before we went in.

In a March 16, 2003 Meet the Press interview of Vice President Dick Cheney, held less than a week before the Iraq War began, host Tim Russert reported that “every analysis said this war itself would cost about $80 billion, recovery of Baghdad, perhaps of Iraq, about $10 billion per year. We should expect as American citizens that this would cost at least $100 billion for a two-year involvement.”

And here is the actual outcomes.

FY2003 Supplemental: Operation Iraqi Freedom: Passed April 2003; Total $78.5 billion, $54.4 billion Iraq War
FY2004 Supplemental: Iraq and Afghanistan Ongoing Operations/Reconstruction: Passed November 2003; Total $87.5 billion, $70.6 billion Iraq War
FY2004 DoD Budget Amendment: $25 billion Emergency Reserve Fund (Iraq Freedom Fund): Passed July 2004, Total $25 billion, $21.5 billion (estimated) Iraq War
FY2005 Emergency Supplemental: Operations in the War on Terror; Activities in Afghanistan; Tsunami Relief: Passed April 2005, Total $82 billion, $58 billion (estimated) Iraq War
FY2006 Department of Defense appropriations: Total $50 billion, $40 billion (estimated) Iraq War.
FY2006 Emergency Supplemental: Operations Global War on Terror; Activities in Iraq & Afghanistan: Passed February 2006, Total $72.4 billion, $60 billion (estimated) Iraq War
FY2007 Department of Defense appropriations: $70 billion(estimated) for Iraq War-related costs
FY2007 Emergency Supplemental (proposed) $100 billion
FY2008 Bush administration has proposed around $190 billion for the Iraq War and Afghanistan
FY2009 Obama administration has proposed around $130 billion in additional funding for the Iraq War and Afghanistan.
FY2011 Obama administration proposes around $159.3 billion for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars.

Kind of a little more than the total cost of $100 billion that Cheney alluded to.

That’s the problem with Republicans… “We gotta go to war. We gotta go to war. If we leave they might collapse… “
with no clue of how to pay for it.. No clue that going to war costs money. So it becomes a choice of where better to spend our money. Here at home? or in Iraq?

Drumroll please: The obvious answer is……….

Clueless as Republicans were, they put that war on our credit card. They did not raise revenues one tick to cover the extra expense. They took out a loan to finance the entire operation.

According to a Congressional Budget Office (CBO) report published in October 2007, the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan could cost taxpayers a total of $2.4 trillion dollars by 2017 when counting the huge interest costs because combat is being financed with borrowed money. The CBO estimated that of the $2.4 trillion long-term price tag for the war, about $1.9 trillion of that would be spent on Iraq, or $6,300 per U.S. citizen….

So Cheney’s $100 billion will cost us $2.7 Trillion counting interest paid… And the cost of caring for the humans who survied, is not even included.

We just can’t afford it. Some may say it is a hard decision. Some may say it is a wrong decision. Most will say it was an overdue decision, and it’s about damn time that someone did it.

It’s just funny how no one, no one is reporting the finances lurking behind this decision that made such a decision a no-brainer. There is no other choice really, but to let Iraqi’s handle their affairs themselves.

The Big Fix

The current party system is broken. Gridlock ties up DC, even to the point where the Republican Party will filibuster a bill that they themselves proposed when both houses were Republican. The filibuster is only pursued because if passed it will be considered by us, the public, to be a success for the standing president.

You can’t blame Republicans. They are just trying to survive. Tying up Washington so that nothing gets done, is the only option they have.

Which leaves us with a choice… Should WE the voters continue this same gridlock? Or shall we take matters into our own hands and do something about it?

If we split our votes, the Gridlock continues.

The only way to prevent future gridlock is to make the penalty for doing so, so severe that any future party treads very lightly if it dares try using gridlock as a political weapon again….

That penalty needs to be that the party obstructing all activity in Congress, not receive any votes to return.

Let’s examine this proposition…

Assume all Democrats and no Republicans return to Congress starting 2013. The House would be completely 100% Democratic, and the Senate Republicans would drop down to 36 if all 11 Republicans up this year lost and all Democrats won.

We would have a one party system… or would we?

The Democratic party would soon split. The Progressives from the Blue Dogs… We would continue to have two parties in Congress. It’s just that that they wouldn’t be jockeying around for political points against the other side.

Instead we’d have what Congress was supposed to do. Debate bills on their merits, and once all facts are on the table, vote them either up or down based on the personal convictions of each Senator or House Member…

We’d still have the same debates as the powerful lobbyists swirled around those who would most likely represent their interests…

But if would be as if America took one step to the left. As if the entire political tone of Congress, just shifted left.

Would the same thing work if the Republicans are put into all seats they run for?

No, and here is why. Republican policy is what got us in this mess. Phil Gramm deregulated derivatives. Eventually that caused the enitire markets to catch up to where Enron went earlier, and collapse. It was the Republicans who decided over Democrats objections, to not raise taxes on the wealthy in order to pay as we went for two wars. So now, we we have a bill coming titled “Payment Due,” for those two wars plus interest. It was Republicans who because we had a surplus, decided to stop that money coming into the Treasury that was paying off our debt. So under them, we added debt on, and stopped paying our payments. No wonder the deficit is so high.

They are the wrong person to put into unlimited power.. simply for when they were there, the got to exercise with impunity all their dreams. We are bankrupt now…

Harken back to the era of Clinton, and everyone was making money… whether you were poor, middle, or rich… You made money and had more left over to spend on yourself, than you do now…

That simple comparison is why we need to go to an all Democratic Congress and not an all Republican one.

We will always have divided government. It is just that when it becomse divided along party lines, and not along the lines of the American people, that we get the gridlock we see happening daily today…

Republicans are the cause.. Their elimination (no offense to the nice Republicans I know) will be the beginning of a new day for America.

The last time we eliminated Republicans was in 1932. It took 64 years for them to return. Those were the best years America has ever had.

Why Michelle Is Imploding

She won’t change… That is essentially it. The darling of the Tea Party after the Democratic landslide, she kept her voice.

It is one thing to say outrageous things when you are trying desperately to keep a fire alive. It is another, to say outrageous things, when you are running for the most powerful position on the planet…..

The resignations that are coming at a quick pace now, are only cascading now because when they were first raised, she dismissed them. They couldn’t do that to her; it didn’t fit into her plan.

It is highly likely that her campaign is finished. Just today’s shots of her, show her disoriented, slightly unkempt, almost like she’d just come down off Xanex…

Not what I’d want running the country during a crises….

There is a reason she has no funding.

Her website has no meat, only fluff. Her one on ones are devoted to her insistence that Barack Obama be a one term president. .. When you ask her what she’d do, she repeats all of Dick Cheney’s lines from 2000…. Reminds me of Wendell Wilkie running against Roosevelt.

Those lines are old. Those lines are not working. Those lines are in today’s world, more unbelievable than they were in 2000. Those lines fooled us in 2000. They hopefully fool no one eleven years later…

She had one option to turn it around. She lacked the breadth to see herself in a historical light, and turned down that one chance…

That chance was to capture that silent majority of the American Republican Party… but dissing the extremists who once were her most strident supporters… They’ve left, not because she’s not conservative enough… but because other candidates are making more sense…

When all America is hurting, and we are losing government jobs more than the private economy is creating them… to argue to triple the number of people put out of work, is if not insane, at least in bad taste…

How can she change her luck? By being the first Republican candidate to accept the notion that we must increase revenue. That means raise taxes. Every Republican not running, knows we need to raise taxes. It just is. It is obvious. It is necessary, and it probably won’t hurt, it could even help the economy. We need to raise taxes…

When this was explained to her, by some of her innermost supporters, it was obvious she had no intention of running to win. It is obvious she was doing this for herself, and a handful of benefactors to whom she was bonded with bounds tighter than reality….

As word of this got out, all smart staffers began shuffling off the shift….

Including this one. Figuring on her mid-western common sense winning the day, I had predicted a comeback. Turns out, after seeing things up close, it is a one man operation that has no chance at success…

Which is sad. Her position on the intelligence committee, and the finance committee, would have been a wonderful springboard to bring American values to the forefront, and disassociate herself from the crap that both major parties carry with them…

There are millions looking for a rational alternative to the current President. The Republican who accepts that the wealthy must be taxed more, is the one, who would walk away with the nomination…

It is not corporations or think tanks or radio hosts, or Fox News that votes.. It is Americans.

Her ship is now dead in the water with no sails; pretty soon, her ammunition will dry up too….

And on Thursday, she had the world placed in her hand, and she shoo’d it away.

How To Grow Jobs….

Raise top marginal rate to 40%.

Remove all existing tax credits for corporations. Keep current corporate rate at 35%….

Hire 35,000 additional accountants for the IRS….. Just do it.$35,000,000,000.

Allow dollar for dollar, a one time tax credit over these next two years, for every dollar spent on new construction here within the boundaries of the United States. A small business making $60 million this year, .. times the corporate rate of 35% stands to pay $21 million in corporate Federal Income tax. But with the “kavips deduction”, it instead decides to build 4 new locations with a start up cost of $5 million each…. and pay NO FEDERAL TAXES that year.

Those four new locations, each pump $5 million into their respective economies, which as it changes hands, gets taxed over and over and over again. If each unit has sales over $2 million, at a 30% payroll cost, they over the course of a year, pump an additional $660,000 into each local economy… As that $660,000 changes hands, it gets taxed over and over and over again as well….

So what do we have?

Whereas we had no investment under Republican Tax plans, (all that free money was going to Chinese investment since they worked for $1 a day), now under the kavipsian tax plan, we have in the first year, $21 million invested domestically, and a combined $2.6 million each year in brand new jobs, flowing out through the economy……

That $2.6 million if all in one state with a top rate of 5%, puts $131,000 into the state treasury that was not already there. At 2.5%, it puts $65,000 back into local government…..

If the corporation choses to do the same for a second year… then, those amounts get doubled!

Now, here’s the beauty of the kavipsian tax plan…. Imagine, every business, corporate or private, doing this exact same scenario simultaneously…

Ironically, by raising the rate on the amount of taxes we take from the wealthy and/or corporations, but allow them to deduct dollar for dollar what they spend that year on physical capital (something that gets built) we force businesses to choose between giving the Federal Government more of their money…. or keeping it themselves.

We all benefit when they keep it .. themselves…

How To Keep A Bank From Failing

Mandate it keeps enough cash reserves to cover the liabilities that may fail.

Gee, that was real hard to figure out…..

Hip, Hip, Hooray!!!!!!!!! It’s Almost 2012!!!!!!!

And what happens in 2012? No, not the end of the world…. but the end of the world as we know it…..

For in 2012, pieces of the Affordable Care act begin to go into effect….. How awesome is that? And in our own lifetimes too?

What to expect…..

In 2012, thanks to the Affordable Care Act, additional benefits for the 150,000 Medicare enrollees in Delaware include lower prescription drug costs through a 50 percent discount on covered brand name drugs in the coverage gap – or “doughnut hole” – as well as wellness checkups and access to certain preventive care with no copayments, a benefit that all Medicare Advantage plans will offer starting in 2012. As a result, Medicare beneficiaries will be able to get free preventive screenings for heart disease, blood pressure, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, and other chronic conditions. In 2011 alone, over 20 million Medicare beneficiaries received an annual wellness checkup or received other preventive services with no deductible or cost sharing.

Thank you President Obama. Thank you Democratic Party of the USA…!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

How bad would we have been for us if Republicans had stopped this as they tried soooo hard to do?

It’s going to be a great year!!!!!

Thinking Things Through…..

As I’ve written, and read, it appears very hard to discuss this Great Divide that has occurred between the 1% and the 99% …. without sounding shrill or hateful… by either side…

Murdoch’s publications probably just like me, think they are presenting facts. But in the way they do so, it seems like all the scripts for their showy, sexy voiceboxes, are being written by little warped, frustrated old men….. And there have been times when I’ve just simply stating facts, and then upon the final edit, caught a vague feeling that a caustic tone had crept unawares into the body of my work….

One sees the same reading comments on Delaware Liberal,…. and Delaware Politics…. on the Daily Kos, and on all the major media news stories.. at the bottom….

Each time one senses a restraint is trying to be upheld by the individual authors, but that the issue itself burns through it…

Somewhere, somehow, someway… all of us have come to the conclusion that argument is a contest like muscling the ball across 100 yards… The louder we shout, or the crazier we sound, the more hits we get…

And that last statement may be true…

Sadly that means there can be no end; the crescendo escalates as the metronome marks each passing measure….

And it’s not just politics. It’s our life…

This is probably no exaggeration to say that over the past 24 hours, I have seen San Fransisco’s coach decapitate the opposing coach of that game probably over 100 times… . Well, …. with all the coverage, outrage, animosity, and discussion, one would think it would rank as something on that level, n’est pas? (Seriously, I don’t think the actual one that occurred during the Iraqi Occupation, received as much commentary and commotion. IT… should have…)

So why is there no balance to truth these days? Why is everything being investigated as if it were a lie? Why is everyone so ungrounded in their values? Why is everyone reacting with ferocity instead of humor? With bombasticity instead of clever congeniality?

I think it has to do with the economy. Everything is getting stretched too thin, and is being held up by slights of hands, and not solid economics… Families are tense, finding themselves on the edge of losing everything. Banks are tense, hoping no one looks too closely to understand that they too are also on the edge of losing everything. Republicans are tense; their politics are about to be exposed as a sham and bluster, is the only weapon they have that can throw their opponents off before ever having their fraud be discovered. Just looking at the ads repeated across yesterday’s games. .. Not one ad attempted to persuade me to buy of anything. All, were demanding, almost yelling at me, that I’d better buy their product and not buy anything else. Television audiences are eyeing this years great selections of new computer games: probably because on screen, they seem more real than the world we’re actually live in…

Those who study Europe of 100 years ago… will recognize these same patterns. From art, music, and theater, came the sense of the unreal that was pervasively permeating their lives. That unreal grew 1911,1912,1914,1915,1916, … until the guns fell silent, on the eleventh hour, of the eleventh day, of the eleventh month of 1917…. Then true reality set in… 10 million of Europe’s sons, lay dead, eliminated by the war; 20 million more died of starvation, and disease, that were caused by it.

And as it ended, each nation’s boundaries were remained pretty much the same….. Except for Austria-Hungary, nothing changed. Thirty million people perished … for what reason?

Because everyone was tired (bored) of all the posturing and jabbering, and decided to fight it out as something different, to finally settle the matter… Any party could have walked away,… and it would never have happened… Instead it was like a Pre-Super Bowl week with all the hype bantering back and forth from team to team… by day five it’s already too much but it continues: there are still 2 days to go… By Sunday, everyone is sick of it, and just wants it to be over. But when it died down near the end of 1917, instead of a Lombardi trophy, we had the decimation of Europe……

We are there again now…. But this time it “ain’t” Europe.

So how do we fix it. What measures can we take?

One solution: don’t do what they did 100 years ago. Back then,autocrats handled the debacle.

It appears that only a “people’s movement” can restore rationality, calmness, thoughtfulness, back into our lives… something that DIDN’T happen in Europe. Their political system simply didn’t have that option; as they weren’t designed for that.

Through the labor movement, and through Teddy Roosevelt, that populist movement and subsequent calming effect, did happen in the United States.

Ways and Means…

Boycott every advertiser on Fox.. All television companies are corporate entities, but boycotts only work where one entity suffers, and the other three profit handsomely at their expense. Boycott everything advertised on the Fox network, and spread the word as to why you are doing it… “You want your country back.”

Threaten bankruptcy each and every time someone tries to collect a past due payment. “Sorry, I simply don’t have the money. We’re probably going to declare bankruptcy soon.. so if you call us again, it had better be with a ridiculously low offer.. like 5% of what we owe to wipe the debt out entirely.”

Seriously the idea of moving your money out of Bank America is a good one. Again, for this to work, one entity has to suffer while the other three prosper. If all giants suffer, no giants budge, because they are not losing ground to their competitors in that sort of environment. But if Bank of America folds, and the other three giants grow, then we will never again see a $5 increase in our swipe fees….

Use Facebook to organize a global attempt to shift all money out of Murdoch’s empire on the same day, say 11/11/11.. Everyone targets that just that one company. Again for it to work, one company must fail, while the others all prosper…

Have a National Holiday From Work Day. If 90% of Americans simply don’t show up for work to say, protest Congress’s incompetence. “Cough, cough… Uh, She-Boss-man, I’m a little under the weather… cough, cough… Been up all night; didn’t get a lick of sleep; just got done throwing up and then it came out that “other” end way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way, way,… too fast… ” (damn tequila!) …

Find a friend, neighbor, and go occupy something cool that close by…